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Beyond Beef: the Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Monday, 8 February 2010 12:00 A GMT+10

Beyond Beef: the Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Cattle and beef production is a primary threat to the global environment. It is a major contributor to deforestation, soil erosion and desertification, water scarcity, water pollution, depletion of fossil fuels, global warming, and loss of biodiversity.

We need to examine the devastating effects of the cattle culture that has come to shape and warp our world and the impact of White Australia on aboriginal culture. That is the anthropology, history, sociology, economics and ecology of this land we call Australia; A world in which the poorer peoples of the planet have been starved to support the beef addiction of a handful of wealthy nations.

The rape and pillage of stolen land from aboriginal Australians parallels that of the Native Americans. In Australia the introduced hard hoofed species have taking over and decimated a great deal of indigenous flora and fauna, lands and water which aboriginal looked after for thousands of years guided by their cultural lore.

Quote from Animal Liberation Australian professor Peter Singer: “Western-style meat production is cruel, unhealthy and damaging to the ecology.”

Soil Erosion and Desertification

Cattle production is turning productive land into barren desert in the American West and throughout the world. Soil erosion and desertification is caused directly by cattle and other livestock overgrazing.

Over cultivation of the land, improper irrigation techniques, and deforestation are also principal causes of erosion and desertification, and cattle production is a primary factor in each case.

Depletion of Fossil Fuels

Intensive animal agriculture uses a disproportionate amount of fossil fuels. Supplying the world with a typical American meat based diet means loss of Biodiversity

Global Warming

Cattle and beef production is a significant factor in the emission of three of the four global warming gases -- carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane.

Petrochemical fertilizers used to produce feed crops for grain-fed cattle release nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. Worldwide, the use of fertilizers has increased dramatically from 14 million tons in 1950 to 143 million tons in 1989. Nitrous oxide now accounts for 6 percent of the global warming effect.

Loss of Biodiversity

Riparian zones -- the narrow strips of land that run alongside rivers and streams where most of the range flora and fauna are concentrated -- have been the hardest hit by cattle grazing. More than 90 percent of the original riparian zones of Arizona and New Mexico are gone, according to the Arizona State Park Department. Colorado and Idaho have also been hard hit. The GAO reports that "poorly managed livestock grazing is the major cause of degraded riparian habitat on federal rangelands."

Unable to compete with cattle for food, wild animals are disappearing from the ranges. Between 1966 and 1983 Brazil estimates that 38 percent of its rain forest was destroyed for cattle pasture.²

By Benny Zable

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Listen Now - 2010-01-09 |Download Audio - 09012010

Dreams: the stuff memories are made of?

Sunday, 7 February 2010 12:00 A GMT+10

Dreams: the stuff memories are made of?

Animal Cognition and Human Sentience

Dreams feel meaningful — drawn from a mishmash of content from our waking lives. But it's a hot debate among scientists, who are yet to confirm why we sleep, let alone dream. Neuroscientist Matthew Wilson's extraordinary experiments involve eavesdropping on the sleeping minds of rats. He proposes dreaming is central to how we remember and learn.

Matthew Wilson: Memory is really much more than simply a record of experience, it is what really defines who we are and who we are going to be. We really have to rethink the term itself — memory.

Edwin Robertson: There has been an intuitive connection for literally thousands of years between sleep and memory. I mean even such simple phrases as, 'Oh, I'll need to sleep on it,' suggests that we have an intuitive notion that sleep is important for memory processing.

Natasha Mitchell: I'm Natasha Mitchell… Memory — is it the stuff that dreams are made of, literally? Sit back, start counting those sheep. Believe it or not, we're dreaming one neuron at a time… On the question of whether a psychoanalyst's take on dreams can ever be reconciled with a neuroscientist's — here's what he says:

Robert Bosnak: Oh yes, I think they are being reconciled as we speak. For instance we're finding in neuroscience that cognition and the neocortex is involved in dreaming and that therefore meaning can come from dreaming itself. I think that more of these connections are going to be found. You have to see that neuroscience is very young: MRIs started in 1993 so we've been doing MRIs for 16 years and the resolution on MRIs is about as good as photography in the 1820s. So it is just beginning, and I think that neuroscience as it matures will find more and more connections between their field and ours.

Natasha Mitchell: So today we're considering a vexed question in neuroscience — do we dream in order to remember? One of the reasons this is tricky for science is that, surprisingly, we don't really know why it is we sleep, let alone dream.

Edwin Robertson: Yes, it is surprising that we spend so much of our time asleep but yet we still don't really have a clear understanding of why it is that we do sleep.

Natasha Mitchell: Edwin Robertson is assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Edwin Robertson: I think that part of the problem very often is that we imagine that all animals use sleep for the same purpose. The function of sleep in humans might be quite different from the function that a koala uses sleep for. So the koala most likely uses sleep for the regulation and conservation of energy and that's why it ends up sleeping for 20 hours a day, whereas our human need for sleep may be driven by other alternative factors.

Natasha Mitchell: Is sleep there to help our body recover metabolically, or is it actually fundamentally about allowing us to consolidate the stuff that goes through our brain during the day? What do you think?

Matthew Wilson: Well I think it's a combination of all of these things. Clearly there is a metabolic component to it. So this is something cells should do, that bodies should do. The question is whether that's all it does.

Natasha Mitchell: Matthew Wilson is professor of neuroscience at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in Boston.

Matthew Wilson: The resting brain is not really resting at all, it's extremely active and that activity in many respects is indistinguishable from the activity that's engaged in during wakefulness. Can all of that be going on to no useful end? And I think that the answer to that is probably no. But to be fair to those critics that argue that nothing goes on during sleep, there is no processing of memory, there is no learning, it is something that has not yet been proven unequivocally but this is simply a matter of time.

Natasha Mitchell: As you'll hear, Matthew Wilson is leading the charge with some extraordinary experiments testing a theory that sleep is key to remembering and learning. And without the capacity to learn we wouldn't really be human would we? We'll come to where dreams fit in in a moment but let's start with why the machinations of our memory might need sleep. Each time we remember something a vast network of brain cells fire together corresponding to that memory, they chemically communicate with each other across the synapses or junctions between them. The more a memory is recalled, the stronger those synaptic connections are. Edwin Robertson.

Edwin Robertson: Sleep is often viewed as a special environment for memory processing. Some people might argue that this special environment is merely that it performs protective function, it's a protective cocoon, because when you're asleep you can't get any further experiences during that time and it prevents memories from being interfered with. Other theories would say no, that's incorrect, that there's actually profoundly important electrophysiological events that occur in the sleeping brain that are important for memory processing per se.

Natasha Mitchell: What's the other prevailing theory for why sleep is so crucial for memory?

Edwin Robertson: There's an idea that essentially sleep allows a homeostatic readjustment of synapses during awake you're bombarded by experiences and that leads to multiple synapses being engaged and their weights being changed. And then what sleep allows—and specifically actually slow wave sleep—is a pruning back of those unimportant synapses. So it's kind of like I imagine in some senses the judicial pruning of your roses to get a nicer flower. So the idea is that the slow wave sleep is able to prune back synapses that are energetically wasteful but are also wasteful in an information processing account because they are adding noise. And that clearer crisper signal then translates into improved performance the next day.

Natasha Mitchell: So from the possible role of sleep to that of dreams. Is it simply a coincidence that we often dream about things we happen to remember, things that have happened to us or that we've learned from our waking lives? Some scientists think of dreams as epi-phenomena that is meaningless, random by-products of the real business of the thinking brain. Neuroscientist Matthew Wilson—controversially for some—disagrees.

Matthew Wilson: I think they are not meaningless. It's easier to see what the meaning, that potential meaning, might be when we study animals like rats, whose life experience is much simpler than ours. So when we study the dreams of rats we're studying animals that have only had months of experience and we've controlled all of that experience, and what we see reflects very closely their actual experience. Now a human, when we think about our own human dreams, we're thinking about dreams that now have access to decades of experience. They may seem complex and obscure because they are bringing together, combining and evaluating decades of memories and experience.

But if we think about dreams not as a process of simply retrieving, of replaying memories, but of re-evaluating, reorganising something—akin to taking piles of paper that have accumulated and now one needs to organise it. As you go through this process picking up one piece of paper and another they may not seem related but as you organise them the end product is something that is actually more useful.

So if we think about dreams and the seemingly chaotic structure and nature of dreams as reflecting this process of reorganisation, I think we get a better idea of what might be going on during sleep. Again, not simply taking memories, replaying them and transferring them to other parts of the brain, but really re-evaluating, reorganising.

Natasha Mitchell: So in a sense it's a filing process and some people think that sleep and dreams allow for memories to be organised into a sort of more efficient storage system.

Matthew Wilson: Correct. The most efficient again being the discovery of rules and relationships and condensing it into something that now captures all of the relationships that were present—the rule—and so discovering the rule may be precisely the kind of complex, difficult to understand processing that goes on during sleep and dreams.

Natasha Mitchell; It's so interesting, because our dreaming brain seems to want to try and make sense of all the elements that it's you know messing about with. I mean my dreams I've got to say are grand epic narratives every night on a scale of Gone with the Wind, I've got to tell you, it's exhausting. It certainly seems much more anarchic than the way we normally remember in our waking lives.

Matthew Wilson: I think if we think about this kind of process not simply about retrieving memories and storing them, but taking them and trying to imagine a future that could have come from them, synthesising rather than simply storing. Perhaps your epic narratives are in a way projecting where you would like to go, where your memories and your experience feel that you could go. You know you may never get there but the brain is trying to understand in a sense, pushed to its limits, where experience tells it it might go.

Natasha Mitchell: Memory is imagining the future, not just storing the past — nice idea. Matthew Wilson comes to dreams from his first research love which is memory. And if you thought sleep was scientifically elusive, try memory. It's that complexity that AS Byatt reflects on in her recent collection, Memory and Anthology a compilation of literary and scientific musings on the many faces of memory.

[Reading]: I have a memory I think of as 'The Memory'. It is seen from the point of view of a small person seeing over the wall of a playground in East Hardwick Elementary School. The stone is hot, and is that kind that flakes into gold slivers. The sun is very bright. There's a tree overhead and leaves catch the light and are golden and in the shade they are blue/green.

Over the wall and across the road is a field full of daisies and buttercups and speedwell and shepherd's purse. On the horizon are trees with thick trunks and solid branches. The child thinks I am always going to remember this, then she thinks, what is remembering? This is the point where myself then and myself now confuse themselves into one.

I know I've added to this memory every time I have thought about it, or brought it out to look at it. It has acquired notes of Paradise Lost which I don't think it had when I was 5 or 6. It has got further away and brighter, more or less real.

I always associate it with one of my very few good memories of my maternal grandmother, a perpetually cross person who never smiled. The year she died she began to forget, and forgot to be irritated. She said to me sitting by the fire at Christmas, do you remember all the beautiful young men in the fields? And she smiled at me like a sensuous young girl. She may have been talking about the airmen who were billeted on her in the war, or she may have been remembering something from long before my mother was born. I shall never know. But I can see the young men in the fields.

Matthew Wilson: Memory is really more about learning, learning from the past rather than simply storing it. The challenge that the brain has is trying to form a model of the world; we are constantly trying to understand how the world works so that we can make predictions. Of course our biggest challenge is making good decisions in novel contexts or circumstances. Not simply repeating the past, often repeating the mistakes of the past, but rather trying to learn from that so that we can make decisions in unpredictable circumstances. And that's what really separates us, sentient organisms that are able to move forward in an unpredictable world, separates us from simple computing devices. And so my deeper interest is in this re-evaluation, revisitation—how memory is retrieved, restored and re-examined because this is memory put to use.

Natasha Mitchell: But take us inside your lab - you've developed some quite extraordinary experimental techniques to effectively eavesdrop on memories as they're formed in the brain cells of rats. What approach have you taken and what have you been able to measure?

Matthew Wilson: Well what we are measuring are the discharges of individual brain cells. Brain cells communicate through electrical signals, changes in voltages much like the pops and clicks that you might hear on the radio if you tune it to some place between stations on the dial. These little electrical discharges are driven by input from the outside world so there's a code that is created.

Now what we would like to be able to do is to listen in on these signals, and what that requires us to do is take very fine electrodes—electrodes are little wires about the size of a human hair, smaller than a human hair actually—we take these wires and we send them down into the brain where they can listen in to these signals. They are placed next to brain cells. We leave them there permanently so that we have little microphones distributed across the brain and as animals engage in normal behaviour: sitting, resting, sleeping, running, we can follow the activity of these brain cells. Not just individual brain cells but many of them because we implant many of these very fine electrodes.

So what we have are rodents, rats and mice, that have little badminton shaped hats, now it's these hats when we plug our electronics into them we're able to take the signals, the brain signals out, amplify them and record them on our computers, then follow the patterns as animals engage in normal daily experience.

Natasha Mitchell: Well as normal as the life of the rat in a lab can be, I guess.

The making of memory, ours and rats', involves a couple of key brain structures, our brain's ancient core which we share with reptiles called the limbic system and especially a structure in it called the hippocampus, and this communicates with the outer layer of our brains, the neocortex; newer in evolutionary terms, and busy with the processing of sensations, perceptions, thinking, planning, evaluating social behaviours etc. So back to that extraordinary rat rig-up we just heard about.

Matthew Wilson: One of the reasons we were interested in sleep is that during sleep the brain in a sense is cut off from the outside world. So that if we see patterns, or we see traces of past experience popping up once again, we know that it is in fact memory, because it's not being driven by anything the animal is currently experiencing. So we are using sleep as a way of looking for and examining the content and structure of memory. And what we found was that when animals would engage in very simple behaviours, running around in little mazes, and as the animals would run along these tracks in this part of the brain, the hippocampus, very unique patterns that allowed us to tell from moment to moment precisely where the animal was and what it was doing.

So very much like a video record of the animal's actual behaviour. Now we would look for these patterns as they changed over time, much like we would be watching a movie and then going back to see whether or not that movie was being replayed. And what we discovered was that during sleep, in fact small segments of these animals' experience running through the maze was replayed. But it was replayed in a form that was compressed: seconds or even minutes of experience would be re-expressed in just a fraction of a second. So little flashes of activity in the brain which would replay small segments of the animal's past experience. And this would go on over and over as the animal slept.

Natasha Mitchell: I wonder if that's a conscious process or an unconscious process?

Matthew Wilson: Well that's a great question, of course now we can't ask the rats whether or what it is that they're thinking about. We can only measure what it is that they are thinking about. So it is a bit of a stretch, I'm always a bit reluctant to refer to what we are looking at as a process of thought, but I have to say that if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck. And in this case I believe that these rats are thinking but we don't know how much of it is actually making its way to the level of consciousness that we might introspectively think we engage in.

Natasha Mitchell: How do you know that the patterns of neurons that you're measuring, firing in a sleeping rat who happens to be remembering an activity when they were awake, actually corresponds to those precise patterns that they also played out in their brain when they were doing the activity. I mean is the correlation that precise?

Matthew Wilson: It is that precise. Literally individual brain cells in this part of the brain, the hippocampus, they fire in a unique pattern, a unique sequence when individual animals engage in unique behaviour in a unique context. If we take an animal and we put it in one room and have it run back and forth for chocolate, we will see one pattern. If we have the animal do exactly the same thing but simply move it to another room, we see another unique pattern. If we bring the animal back to the original room, that original pattern returns. So it is as though an animal's experience in a given place at a given time is captured. So it's the fact that we can see the unique fingerprints during awake experience that then allows us to go back and interpret these unique fingerprints of brain activity during sleep. So it is the remarkable property of this part of the brain, the hippocampus.

Natasha Mitchell: Eavesdropping on the neuronal fireworks going on in the hippocampus of a sleeping rat—it's incredible, but at what point does dreaming come into this story?

Matthew Wilson: We follow that up by looking elsewhere in the brain and discovered that when this part of the brain, the old part of the brain, the hippocampus, was replaying these memories that the new part, the neocortex, the part that deals with perception and action, was also replaying the same information. So as the hippocampus replayed memory of what the animal was doing, the visual cortex would replay what the animal was seeing.

Now you might think of that as being perhaps a description of what we would call a dream, events that seem to occur over time that carry with them the imagery of experience. And these rats seemed to be engaging in precisely that kind of behaviour during sleep—just as we introspectively feel that we do.

So it suggested that this part of sleep, slow wave sleep, is the kind of sleep that you enter into, it's a very primitive form of sleep, not what you typically associate with dream sleep but the slow wave sleep where you can see this memory replay going on. Now we realised that this kind of sleep like activity didn't simply go on during slow wave sleep, it also went on whenever animals were simply sitting quietly, resting. There was even more than simple replay going on. We found these events being replayed but in reverse time order, it was as though the animals were playing their memories backward, backward in time. Now that seemed curious, why would you want to play memories backward in time?

Natasha Mitchell: Why indeed?

Matthew Wilson: Well it turns out there had been a whole field of study in the area known as machine learning, trying to get computers to learn the way animals and humans do. And this strategy of playing things backward turned out to be important in learning for machines. It simply wasn't known, or perhaps even believed, that it could be done in biological systems, in animals or humans. And so here in a sense these rats were demonstrating that memory was being processed precisely in the way that it should if it were being used to drive learning. So it wasn't simply replaying it for the purpose of creating imagery, creating dreams, it was doing it in order to learn from it. So that when animals were sitting quietly they were pondering what they had done, perhaps planning what they were going to do for the purpose of learning, trying to figure things out, building models in order to try to anticipate future choices and decisions.

Natasha Mitchell: As convincing as the data from Matthew Wilson's lab rats sounds, linking learning and memory, there is a robust debate going on here and not everyone's convinced that memory and dreams are linked. Edwin Robertson.

Edwin Robertson: They've shown very nice work, showing that in the hippocampus during slow wave sleep or in the parietal cortex, in the motor cortex, in the prefrontal cortex, that during periods of sleep the patterns of neural activity that you see as an animal is moving around and navigating around a maze are re-instantiated, are replayed during periods of sleep.

The challenges that face the community in fully fleshing that idea out I think are several-fold. Firstly the replay that people see neurophysiologically is at a completely different time base than when the rat is finding its way around the maze neurons go a lot more slowly than when you see that replay occurring during sleep. So why is it time-compressed and can we really think that time compression as being really truly replayed?

I think the second point, which is a far stronger and more problematic element, is that no one has yet demonstrated that that replay is then linked to the benefits or the behavioural manifestation of memory consolidation. So it's never been shown for example if you disrupt that replay that you prevent memory consolidation. Nor that the amount of replay is related to memory consolidation.

So certainly does replay occur during sleep? Yes. Does it have anything to do with memory processing? Unfortunately we still don't know, it certainly as a neuro-physiological phenomenon it occurs, how that relates to my behaviour the next morning we still don't know unfortunately.

Natasha Mitchell: That said there is an effort to probe what happens to our capacity to learn and remember when we miss sleep—and don't we all—and it seems to be bad news for humans. Matthew Wilson.

Matthew Wilson: Now one can also see that there are effects of sleep when you train an animal to perform a difficult task. One sees that the structure of their sleep changes, that the amount of this kind of processing that we see changes, that they use sleep to try to go back and study, replay, re-evaluate things that were important in solving tasks.

Natasha Mitchell: Well that's interesting, isn't it, because science is certainly starting to tangibly prove that if we miss sleep our ability to learn and remember is fundamentally affected.

Matthew Wilson: That's correct, there's a lot of evidence that points to that. Now again to be fair to the critics of the sleep, memory and learning hypothesis, that does not indicate that the memory processing during sleep is important; only that the sleep state itself is important—that when deprived of sleep it affects general things like attention, it affects stress; it's generally disruptive. Not specifically disruptive to memory; the sleep, memory and learning hypothesis really says that it is the information that the brain is actually processing, the things that you dream about, that lead to specific enhancements, specific learning when you wake up. And that's again something that requires more study. It is something that I firmly believe that we will answer.

Natasha Mitchell: We've heard about the rats replaying and reorganising memories, at least during slow wave sleep. We do dream in this phase but the dreams aren't as lively or as frequent as is the case for REM sleep. But some folk don't experience REM at all, and if memory and dreaming are linked according to Matthew Wilson's theory, does that mean they can't remember anything either? Matthew Wilson thinks REM sleep might in fact pay more of a value-adding role after slow wave sleep has done its work, a sort of mental testing ground for creativity and imagination, new ideas and possibilities. Higher order thinking—but is that something rats can do though?

Traditionally I guess we've possibly thought that animals can't possibly have as rich a dream life as us.

Matthew Wilson: Or a dream life at all.

Natasha Mitchell: Or a dream life at all.

Matthew Wilson: Absolutely, I think that the idea that animals live in the present, this is a very common, persistent and overwhelmingly dominant view: memory allows them to modify the brain, to change the way they act in the present, but they simply don't live in the past, they don't think into the future. I think that that is changing; what we're seeing is that they do both, and that the way in which they do it may not be entirely dissimilar from the way in which humans do that. So that all of cognition, not just human cognition, may possess this kind of rich tapestry of experience. And I think that that is something that, to me, is very reassuring, that we are not alone, we are not unique in the domain of animals and organisms, that the world is a much richer place for all of us.

Natasha Mitchell: Matthew Wilson you are a neuroscientist and an engineer, you're a long way away from the realm of Dr Sigmund Freud, but he embraced dreams and memory with equal passion to yourself, and I wonder if there's an interesting potential for a convergence between the thinking of psychoanalysists like Jung and Freud and your own investigations of dreams and memory.

Matthew Wilson: Well I think to the extent that we start on common ground and that is the belief that there is meaning to dreams, that these are windows into a level of brain function that's not normally accessible during our awake life. Now trying to interpret the imagery, you know the content, that's where things become difficult, that that's probably where basic neuroscience diverges from the Freudian psychoanalytical perspective: we're not simply trying to interpret the patterns that we see, we're trying to understand how the patterns contribute to the process, the construction of models of the world that we use to guide decisions.

Natasha Mitchell: Matthew Wilson from MIT, thanks for joining us on ABC Radio National, and sweet dreams.

Matthew Wilson: You're welcome, you too, Natasha.

Natasha Mitchell: Professor Matthew Wilson from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and before him Edwin Robertson from Harvard Medical School. And we'd love your comments on the last two shows on dreams on the blog, simple to do and it always sparks conversation among other listeners, we love that. All at

Thanks this week to reader Anne McInerney, producer Anita Barraud, studio engineer Carey Dell and I'm Natasha Mitchell. May your dreams be sweet.

- A Radio National (Australia) transcript from All In the Mind

Matthew A Wilson
Scholar, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
Professor,
Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biology
Investigator, RIKEN-MIT Neuroscience Research Center
Massachusetts Institute of Learning and Memory
http://web.mit.edu/picower/faculty/wilson.html

Edwin M Robertson
Assistant Professor
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Harvard Medical School
http://research.bidmc.harvard.edu/research/ResearchPIInfo.ASP?Submit=Display&PersonID=589

from - http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2010/2745024.htm

9 January 2010

Images - http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/rro/lowres/rron67l.jpg

http://dreadfuldreams.blogsome.com/images/koalowl_01.jpg

http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200502/r41148_104701.jpg

http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203/s2007/madisen_neil/images/indexpic.jpg

For further enlightenment see –

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

(These sites have been locked by Today.com and this author no longer has access to his own blogs - Enlightenment Today

From the New Illuminati – http://newilluminati.blog-city.com

tags: dreams dreaming memory rat brains animal cognition neuroscientist matthew wilson radio national learning all in the mind natasha mitchell consciousness

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4967330n

LOW-ENERGY NUCLEAR TRANSMUTATION

Saturday, 6 February 2010 12:00 A GMT+10

LOW-ENERGY

NUCLEAR TRANSMUTATION

A Primer for Non-Physicists

by Gary Vesperman

See ‘more than junk science’ cold fusion clip

- the amended video at

Atoms are comprised of negatively charged electrons whirling around a relatively small nucleus of neutrons and positively charged protons. Protons have a mass 1836 times the mass of electrons. A neutron is a combination of an electron and a proton with zero net electrostatic charge. An atom’s number of protons and its equal number of electrons determine its type of element. Only when a positive ion (such as a proton or nucleus of a helium atom) penetrates an atom’s nucleus does the atomic nucleus become another element (or another isotope of the same element) or becomes unstable and splits (fissions) into two or more elements.

For decades, physicists have assumed that changing (transmuting) elements always requires high energies. Elaborately expensive machinery was required to accelerate a positively charged particle of less than atomic size to a high enough energy to overcome the electrostatic repulsion of an atom’s nucleus and penetrate its interior.

Cold fusion is only one of several types of physical phenomena which indicate the existence of a mechanism by which elements could be changed to other elements without seemingly requiring very high energies. However, the secret of cold fusion’s excess heat had remained a mystery until September 13, 1996 when Kenneth Shoulders explained how the fracturing of palladium loaded with hydrogen (deuterons) could produce high-density charge clusters and cause nuclear reactions.

Based on this evidence and on the pioneering work of Rod Neal and Stan Gleeson, a trio of physicists, Hal Fox, Robert W. Bass, and Shang-Xian Jin, finally deduced a more complete theory of the nature of the mechanism which extends beyond the discovery of cold fusion. The magnitude of their fundamental scientific discovery can best be appreciated by considering that Hal Fox’s Fusion Information Center, Inc., has collected over 3,000 papers on cold fusion since its discovery in 1989 without anyone being able to offer a complete understanding of just how cold fusion works.

What follows is a simplified explanation of their remarkable concept using an analogy of electrons as ping pong balls and protons as bowling balls. Visualize a room with one wall as the positive plate connected to the positive terminal of a battery, and the opposite wall as the negative plate connected to the battery’s negative terminal. Each ping pong ball is negatively charged and when released at the negative wall, electrostatic repulsion/attraction will cause the ping pong ball to fly across the room to the positive wall. Each bowling ball is positively charged and when released at the positive wall, it will roll slowly in the opposite direction across the room to the negative wall.

Both the ping pong ball and the bowling ball have an equal but opposite electrostatic charge. So therefore they both draw the same amount of electrical energy from the battery as they fly or roll from one wall to the opposite wall. But because the ping pong ball is so much lighter than the bowling ball, the ping pong ball will strike the opposite wall at a much greater speed than the bowling ball.

Now assume that 1,000,000 ping pong balls are released as a cluster at the negative wall. (At a high enough density, electrons will forget their mutual electrostatic repulsion and cluster in the same manner as ball lightning. Mother Nature sometimes pulls weird tricks.) Embedded in the ping pong ball cluster are 10 bowling balls. Because there are so many more negatively charged ping pong balls, the positively charged bowling balls are going to stick with the ping pong balls and ignore the attraction of the negative wall and the repulsion of the positive wall.

So therefore the bowling balls hitch a free ride along with the ping pong balls. When the bowling balls hit the positive wall along with the ping pong balls at the same speed as the ping pong balls, the bowling balls will hit the positive wall with enormously greater energies than if they had hit the negative wall, rolling slowly alone, in the opposite direction.

In the same manner, protons (and other types of positive ions) in ‘low-energy’ nuclear reactions are hurled into the nuclei of atoms by their ‘piggy-back’ ride on high-density electron charge clusters with sufficient energy to split or transmute atoms.

This mechanism apparently is the secret of cold fusion’s excess heat, eliminating radioactivity, transmutation of common elements into scarce elements, and powerful new atom smashers small enough for college physics laboratories. If the new theory holds up to scrutiny by other physicists, it might win a Nobel prize in physics!

Note by windulum2:

Ken Shoulders, perhaps the greatest experimentalist of our time, equivalent to Rutherford in his day, has discovered and extensively proven the properties of what were first called charge clusters - highly energetic circulating toroids of electrons, moving like smoke rings, but with densities and force enough to disintegrate any matter and cause nuclear fusion when carrying protons.

Now called Exotic Vacuum Objects (EVOs), they can exist as fully material or as insubstantial trans-dimensionals, with their centers acting as quantum mechanical black holes/white holes, bringing energy/matter into and out of our reality. They are likely the mechanism of irregularly repeatable cold fusion. They themselves, however, are fairly easily repeatable phenomena by any who choose to try.

April 26, 2009

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From http://www.mercola.com/

Are EMFs Hazardous to Our Health?

Friday, 5 February 2010 12:00 A GMT+10

Are EMFs Hazardous to Our Health?

Electrical Fields Classified Carcinogenic

Can electromagnetic fields (EMF) from power lines, home wiring, airport and military radar, substations, transformers, computers and appliances cause brain tumors, leukaemia, birth defects, miscarriages, chronic fatigue, headaches, cataracts, heart problems, stress. nausea, chest pain, forgetfulness, cancer and other health problems?

Numerous studies have produced contradictory results, yet some experts are convinced that the threat is real.

Dr. David Carpenter, Dean at the School of Public Health, State University of New York believes it is likely that up to 30% of all childhood cancers come from exposure to EMFs. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warns "There is reason for concern" and advises prudent avoidance".

Martin Halper, the EPA's Director of Analysis and Support says "I have never seen a set of epidemiological studies that remotely approached the weight of evidence that we're seeing with EMFs. Clearly there is something here."

Concern over EMFs exploded after Paul Brodeur wrote a series of articles in the New Yorker Magazine in June 1989. Because of Paul Brodeur's reputation. his articles had a catalytic effect on scientists, reporters and concerned people throughout the world.

In November 1989, the Department of Energy reported that "It has now become generally accepted that there are, indeed, biological effects due to field exposure."

The EMF issue gained more publicity in 1990 when alarming reports appeared in Time, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and popular computer publications. ABC's Ted Koppel and CBS's Dan Rather both aired special segments on EMFs.

In addition to the long-term health concerns, buying a house with high fields will be an economic disaster. In a few years, when power line radiation is as well known as asbestos and radon, a house with high fields will be practically impossible to sell. Already there are hundreds of lawsuits regarding EMFs and property devaluation.

EPA Says the Threat Is Real

By 1990, over one hundred studies had been conducted worldwide. Of these, at least two dozen epidemiological studies on humans indicated a link between EMFs and serious health problems. In response to public pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency IEPA) began reviewing and evaluating the available literature.

In a draft report issued in March 1990, the EPA recommended that EMFs be classified as a Class B carcinogen -- -a "probable human carcinogen and joined the ranks of formaldehyde, DDT, dioxins and PCBs.

After the EPA draft report was released, utility, military and computer lobbyists came down hard on the EPA. The EPA's final revision did NOT classify EMFs as a Class B carcinogen Rather, the following explanation was added:"

At this time such a characterization regarding the link between cancer and exposure to EMFs is not appropriate because the basic nature of the interaction between EMFs and biological processes leading to cancer is not understood."

Curiously, this rather unusual logic appears on the same page as the following: "In conclusion, several studies showing leukaemia, Iymphoma and cancer of the nervous system in children exposed to supported by similar findings in adults in several/ occupational studies also involving electrical power frequency exposures, show a consistent pattern of response that suggest a causal link. "

When questioned about the contradictory nature of these statements, the EPA responded that it was "not appropriate" to use the probable carcinogen label until it could demonstrate how EMFs caused cancer and exactly how much EMF is harmful.

This explanation does not satisfy many critics who claim that the EPAs upper management was influenced by political and economic considerations exerted by utility, computer and military lobbyists.

How Do I Measure EMFs?

A Gauss is a common unit of measurement of magnetic field strength. A Gauss meter is an instrument which measures the strength of magnetic fields. Inside a Gauss meter there is a coil of thin wire, typically with hundreds of turns. As a magnetic field radiates through the coil, it induces a current, which is amplified by the circuitry inside the Gauss meter.

Gauss meters may vary in the strength of the magnetic field they are capable of measuring. A meter used for measuring EMFs from power lines, transformers, substations and appliances around the home, for example, should be able to measure as low as .1 mG.

Gauss meters vary widely in price and accuracy. Meters have either a single axis coil or a triple axis coil. Single axis meters are much simpler than triple axis meters to manufacture and thus, are less expensive.

To use a single axis meter you must point the meter's one sensor in three directions -- -the x, y and z axis. Then, you combine the three readings in a mathematical equation to calculate the combined field strength. Obviously, it’s far easier and more accurate to use a 3-axis meter. Triple axis Gauss meters are quite accurate, but they are also more expensive.

Another thing to watch out for when purchasing or renting a Gauss meter is whether or not it is frequency weighted. Most meters will read the same EMF strength no mater what the frequency.

As the human body appears to be sensitive to both the field strength AND the frequency, Gauss meters used for biological purposes should be "frequency weighted".

This means that if the field is different than 60 Hz the meter will consider the frequency and use it in calculating and displaying the EMF's strength. This feature is why frequency weighted meters will show a higher EMF reading than those meters typically used by electricians and engineers.

Power Lines

An enormous amount of electricity is created at power generating stations and sent across the country through wires that carry high voltages. All power lines radiate electromagnetic fields. The question is: how much are the power lines near YOUR home radiating? The amount of EMFs coming from a power line depends on its particular configuration. Power companies know which power line configurations are best for reducing EMFs but most don't feel the evidence supports costly changes in the way they deliver electricity.

Substations

A substation is an assemblage of circuit breakers, disconnecting switches and transformers designed to substations have been blamed for causing cancer clusters among nearby residents. Paul Brodeur wrote about several such cancer clusters in the July 9, 1990 issue of the New Yorker Magazine.

Transformers

A key component of a utility's electrical distribution network depends upon numerous, small transformers mounted on power poles. A transformer looks like a small metal trash can, usually cylindrical.

Even when the electrical service is underground, you will often see a metal box (usually square} located on the ground near the street. Many people don't realize that when they see a transformer, the power line feeding the transformer is 4000 to 13,800 volts.

The transformer then reduces the voltage to the 120/240 volts needed by nearby homes. Since these transformers can be seen in almost every neighbourhood, they are a source of concern.

EMFs near a transformer can be quite high, but due to its small structure, the field strength diminishes rapidly with distance, as it does from any point source. For this reason, having a transformer located near your home is usually not a major source of concern, although just to make sure, everyone should measure the field strength around it.

Home Wiring

If your home has high EMF readings, it is important to determine the sources of the EMF so that remedial action can be taken, if possible. Many times a particular room will have a higher EMF reading. Check to see if the electricity is coming into the house on the wall outside that room. When this is the case, it is usually a good idea to block off that room and only use it for storage purposes.

Sometimes, the source of a high magnetic field is incorrect wiring. If you suspect that your home is wired improperly, obtain the services of a licensed electrician. Warning: Do not touch electric wires, even if you think the current is turned off. If you need to disconnect electrical circuits to determine the source of magnetic fields, you should call a licensed electrician.

Computers

Computers are a complicated subject. Know this: EMFs radiate from all sides of the computer. Thus, you must not only be concerned with sitting in front of the monitor but also if you are sitting near a computer or if a computer is operating in a nearby room.

The Swedish safety standard, effective 711/90, specifies a maximum of 0.25 mG at 50 cm from the display. Many US manufactured computers have EMFs of 5 - 100 mG at this distance. And know this too: the screens placed over monitors do NOT block EMFs. Not even a lead screen will block ELF and VLF magnetic fields.

Space does not permit a more thorough discussion of computers. If you use a computer, it is important that you measure your EMF exposure with a Gauss meter and review the literature concerning the health impacts of computer use.

Electric Blankets and Waterbeds

Electric blankets create a magnetic field that penetrates about 6-7 inches into the body. Thus it is not surprising that an epidemiological study has linked electric blankets with miscarriages and childhood leukaemia.

This pioneering work was performed by Dr. Nancy Wertheimer and Ed Leeper, who originally discovered that magnetic fields were linked to childhood leukaemia. Similar health effects have been noted with users of many electric blankets and waterbed heaters will emit EMFs even when turned off.

The devices must be unplugged to delete the EMF exposure Additionally, there is the issue regarding the vibrations that are generated by sleeping on standing water. There is less hard data in this area but some experts are concerned about the consequences.

Electric Clocks

Electric clocks have a very high magnetic field, as much as 5 to 10 mG up to three feet away. If you are using a bedside clock, you are probably sleeping in an EMF equivalent to that of a powerline Studies have linked high rates of brain tumors with chronic exposure to magnetic fields, so it is wise to place all clocks and other electrical devices (such as telephones and answering devices) at least 6 feet from your bed.

Fluorescent Lights

Fluorescent lights produce much more EMFs than incandescent bulbs. A typical fluorescent lamp of an office ceiling have readings of 160 to 200 mg 1 inch away.

Microwave Ovens and Radar

Microwave ovens and radar from military installations and airports emit two types of radiation -- microwave and ELF. Microwaves are measured in milliwatt per centimetre squared (mW/cm2). As of 1/1/93, the U.S. safety limit for microwave exposure is 1 mW/cm2, down from a previous 10 mW/cm2. The Russian safety limit is .01 mW/cm2. All microwave ovens leak and exceed the Russian safety limit. In addition, recent Russian studies have shown that normal microwave cooking coverts food protein molecules into carcinogenic substances.

When measuring microwaves from military and airport radar sources, 100% accurate readings can only be found with extremely expensive digital peak-hold meters. Why? Because analog devices begin to drop their reading immediately after the radar sweep passes. Thus, while an analog meter can show whether or not you are being exposed to radar EMFs, analog meters can't show your true exposure. Although thousands of dollars to purchase, digital-hold meters capable of accurately detecting radar EMFs can be rented for several hundred to over a thousand dollars per month.

Telephones and Answering Machines

Telephones can emit surprisingly strong EMFs, especially from the handset. This is a problem because we hold the telephone so close to our head. Place the Gauss meter right against the ear piece and the mouth piece before buying a phone.

Some brands emit no measurable fields and others emit strong fields that travel several inches....right into your brain. Answering machines, particular those with adapter plugs (mini-transformers), give off high levels of EMFs.

Electric Razors and Hair Dryers

Electric razors and hair dryers emit EMFs as high as 200 to 400 mG. This seems alarming, but we don't know if this is worse (or better) than a chronic exposure to a 2-3 mG field. Some EMF consultants recommend that hair dryers not be used on children as the high fields are held close to their rapidly developing brain and nervous system.

Prudent Avoidance

Electricity is an inseparable part of our modern day society. This means that EMFs will continue to be all around us. But as Discover Magazine postulated, aside from making our life easier, is electricity also making our lives shorter?

Most experts agree that limited, non-chronic exposure to EMFs is not a threat. For example, it is probably acceptable for a person to be near a toaster in the morning.

BUT, it is not advisable for a person to sleep under an electric blanket, up close, live near a powerline/substation, and sleep in a room where the power enters the home. This person is under an extreme case of chronic exposure. This condition, unfortunately, applies to millions of Americans.

If you wish to follows the EPA's advice and practice "prudent avoidance" then the following advice is offered:

Measure your home, work and school environments with a Gauss meter Measure EMFs both inside and outside your home. Don't let your children play near power lines, transformers, radar domes and microwave towers.

Avoid areas where the field is above 1 mG. Measure the EMFs from appliances both when they are operating and when they are turned off. Some appliances (like TVs) are still drawing current even when they are off.

Don't sleep under an electric blanket or on a waterbed. If you insist on using these, unplug them before going to bed (don't just turn it off). Even though there is no magnetic field when they are turned off, there may still be a high electric field.

Don't sit too close to your TV set. Distance yourself at least 6 feet away. Use a Gauss meter to help you decide where it is safe to sit.

Rearrange your office and home area so that you are not exposed to EMFs from the sides/backs of electric appliances and computers. In the home, it is best that all major electrical appliances, such as computers, TVs, refrigerators etc, be placed up against outside walls. That way you are not creating an EMF field in the adjoining room.

Don't sit too close to your computer. Computer monitors vary greatly in the strength of their EMFs, so you should check yours with a meter. Don't stand close to your microwave oven. Move all electrical appliances at least 6 feet from your bed. Eliminate wires running under your bed. Eliminate dimmers and 3-way switches.

Be wary of cordless appliances such as electric toothbrushes and razors. You may choose not to wear a quartz-analog watch because it radiates pulsating EMFs along your acupuncture meridians.

An older mechanical windup watch would be an acceptable alternative. It is also recommended to wear as little jewellery as possible and to take it off at night. Many people have metal sensitivity which can be aggravated by placing it right on the skin. Measure with a gauss meter to be sure.

And last, but not least, always always always remember that EMFs pass right through walls. The EMF you are reading on your Gauss meter could be radiating from the next room...or from outside your home.

Additional Radiation Info:

Eyeglass frames should ideally be made from plastic with no wires in them, otherwise they can serve as an antenna to focus the radio and cellular phone waves directly into your brain.

What EMF Level Is Safe?

There's a heated debate as to what electromagnetic field (EMF) level is considered safe. Since the experts have not come to a consensus, you'll have to decide for yourself... Many government and utility documents report the usual ambient level of 60-Hz magnetic field to be 0.5 mG.

Thus, any reading higher than 0.5 mG is above the "usual" ambient exposure. Many experts and public officials, as well as the few governments that have made an effort to offer public protection, have adopted the 3 mG cutoff point. The EPA has proposed a safety standard of 1 mG. Sweden has set a maximum safety limit of 1 mG.

Dr. Robert Becker, an MD who has been studying the effects of EMFs for 20 years, states a l mG safety limit in his book Cross Currents. When electricians try to solve a magnetic field problem they do their best to drop the level to 1 mG or below.

Dr. Nancy Wertheimer, a Ph.D. epidemiologist who has been studying EMFs for 20 years, has been looking at the epidemiological data in a different way -- she is trying to associate EMF levels with health rather than disease. The level she is coming up with is a cut off of 1 mG. Russian researchers claim that 1/1000ths of a mG should be the standard.

The BioElectric Body believes that there are several stages of health between "optimum wellness", "degenerative disease" and "Cancer". Thus, we maintain our own living and sleeping quarters at 0.5mG and below.

Recommended Reading

Cross Currents - The Perils of Electropollution. The Promise of Electromedicine Robert 0. Becker, M.D. Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1990

Currents of Death - The Attempt to Cover Up the Threat to Your Health Paul Brodeur Simon and Schuster, 1989

Electromagnetic Man Health & Hazard in the Electrical Environment Cyril W. Smith & Simon Best St. Martin's Press. Inc. 1989

People often ask why I live in a rainforest with no mobile phone access or mains electricity. – R.A.

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